1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to application server management and more particularly to visualizing a system and system state using a hierarchical tree control in an application server management tool.
2. Description of the Related Art
The popularization of more complex, enterprise computing environments has resulted in efforts to explore the relationship between the state of a host platform and the performance of a hosted application. To further explore the changing states of applications deployed within the enterprise, application server management tools have been developed whose purpose is to detect state changes of a monitored application. In furtherance of its purpose, typical application server management tools can be coupled to monitored applications and can monitor resources which affect the operation of the host platform and any executing applications within the application server.
Recent developments in application server monitoring tools provide for performance monitoring software which monitors the performance and efficiency of systems and rebalances or off-loads heavy workloads to applications servers that enjoy spare capacity. Using an advanced for of an application server monitoring tool, network managers can choose to manually approve any changes to a server farm configuration, or network managers can elect for the automated application of changes. Modern application server monitoring tools further can partition large jobs over multiple processors, databases and application servers to provide an optimal level of performance, and can prioritize a workload based on the relative importance of an application to a business process.
To facilitate the visualization of an application server system topology and the state of the application server system, hierarchical tree controls have been liberally incorporated in the user interface of application server management tools. Hierarchical tree controls organize a system topology into a tree hierarchy consisting of a root node representing the system, a multiplicity of leaf nodes representing the atomic elements of the system, and any number of intermediate parent nodes for the leaf nodes. Individual branches of the tree hierarchy can be collapsed and expanded at will within the user interface so as to provide a customized view of the system within the limited display space of the user interface.
Within a tree hierarchy, some leaf nodes, for instance leaf nodes representing application servers, can be “sick” in that logic executing within the application server can fault or approach a fault condition resulting in a high severity error condition. When an application server is “sick”, a condition severity icon can be displayed adjacent to the node for the corresponding application server name in the tree hierarchy. In this way, a viewer can visually identify the sick application server. Notwithstanding, in the event where the branch containing the node for the sick application server has been collapsed, the viewer will not be able to visually detect the sick application server. Moreover, to the extent that the node for the sick application server is at a very deep level, the display space for the user interface may not be able to easily accommodate a fully expanded hierarchical tree control.